I’ve had that same sense of my own death on returning to cities or neighborhoods from my past, any of the places from which I’d vanished without a trace and which have carried on regardless, the everyday hustle and bustle, bars that change owners, stores that shut down, streets that are widened, neon signs where before there was nothing. It’s no stretch to see yourself as a ghost among neighbors who no longer recognize you, the handful of storekeepers who remain behind their counters, affable and grown old as if by magic, the groups of kids who appear out of nowhere, making their way home from school amid a clamor of shouts and snacks wrapped in tinfoil and soccer balls and schoolbooks with homework for the following day, the clusters of women chatting on the sidewalk, and the pitiful cries of the lottery vendors. That pair of shoes lying on the floor brought home the fact that, for all intents and purposes, I had just died for many people. Without the grieving of others, without the slightest ritual, but with the exact same outcome of dark solitude and absence stretching out as far as the eye could see. My thoughts turned to the names of all those I would never again see, save some freak occurrence, all those individuals who, without my ever having been truly close to them, had nevertheless formed the human backdrop against which my days unfolded. Without the spotlight of their gaze on me, everything took on a nightmarish air. What becomes of a life when no one is watching anymore, aside from a nonentity who comes and goes, eats dinner or doesn’t, squirms or laughs? If, when all is said and done, every life is a story, then every story needs a reader. Otherwise, the world around us runs the risk of fading to nothing, leaving behind nothing more than disjointed perceptions, moments like islands, brief snatches. True destitution arises when we exit the stage and the eyes that followed our movements vanish or explode or simply take to the air like tiny balloons fleeing to the skies of other worlds. Certain parallels can be drawn between the newly abandoned and that classmate orphaned in primary school with whom we all wished to share part of our sandwiches during recess, trying to make sure he was not left all alone with his thoughts in the corner: the un-ironed shirt, the gaze perpetually lost in the distance, and that almost imperceptible dampness pooled in the corners of the eyes. But at least he had a star on which to gaze at night from his bedroom, or so he said, and that same star watched over his footsteps and sometimes even quizzed him on the lesson of the following day. For the one who’s been jilted, instead, the blackness of the sky is filled only with closed eyelids. A vast drawn curtain. When the mannequin is moved from the shop window to the storeroom in the far end of the basement, it matters little what clothes it’s wearing, whether or not it’s broken, whether or not it still trembles.
From Paris, at a distance of so many miles, I was seeking to get a clear view, from another vantage point, of the recent events in my life and the state of mind in which I found myself, while trying, as far as possible, to put things back in some sort of order. I had just moved into a tenthfloor apartment from which I could see the towers on the Cathedral of Our Lady of Pilar and one or two other high-rises that gave the city skyline a Mudejar air. A welcoming spot, with plenty of wood, just as I’ve always liked, plaster bas-reliefs even in the bathroom, and festooned with Japanese ornaments, prints, and plates with painted birds hanging on the walls. The street was on a slope, and the city buses hurtled by, heading downhill to the center of town or skidding alarmingly to a halt in front of the bus shelter that stood on the opposite sidewalk. Sometimes, at night, the noise got mixed up in my slumbers with the sound of a cliff top suddenly crumbling. The bedding and the table linen were the most characterful items in that apartment, everything as if from a bygone age, as if stolen from an imaginary museum dedicated to my childhood. A female friend who dropped by from time to time back then to spice up my siestas a little bought me a new set of bedsheets—“I sleep in this bed of yours and I feel like my own mother or something. I can’t fuck like this.” Though I began using the sheets she had brought, in deference to her, the others were more to my liking. I explained to her that even in Barcelona, most apartments are like this on the inside, I’d seen them. Later, you’d spot their occupants out and about, sporting their designer gear, wearing those gray shirts or riding their bikes, a Nike backpack or a leather bag slung over their shoulders. Which is all well and good, but their apartments are just like this on the inside. Most are, anyway. Flick any switch, and desolation lights up on the ceiling. On the six-bulb chandeliers, two or three bulbs at most work, and they give off a light so yellowish and washed out it’s almost enough to make you wish you were dead, if only so as not to belong, as though you were just one more item among all the others, to the collection of things surrounding you, all taking up a certain volume of air, just like you — everything: crochet circles, porcelain objects, faded towels folded in two in the top drawer of a closet that doesn’t quite close right.
The children would sometimes come by on Fridays. They’d arrive bearing a ton of luggage to spend the weekend. The refrigerator empty. Me barely able to get a word out. They took in their surroundings and exchanged glances before finally turning to face me. I guess the question that hung in the air was something like now what do we do? Not in terms of that particular moment, but rather from now on, what are we going to do, how are we going to manage now that everything we once were has come apart at the seams? With all the suitcases lying around, the travel bags stuffed with changes of clothes, pajamas, and small toys, the backpacks with homework for school, the overcoats lying in a heap, we looked like the surviving members of a family in a refugee camp. It was as if their mother had been killed in an air raid and the three of us, before fleeing, had spotted her dead body peeking out from among the ruins, her white lips stuck to the earth, her hair matted with lime scale, a hazy cloud of flies and dust. I asked myself what right I had to make them breathe the air of that tormented world of mine, the silence, the books strewn on the floor, the grime in the corners, whether I had anything other than sorrow to offer them. And I wondered if a dead father might not be preferable to a downtrodden father falling to pieces before your eyes while you’re powerless to do anything, unable to understand a thing. We would go out for a stroll every now and then, swaddled in scarves and without quite knowing where we were heading. The two of them always trailing behind, following mother duck, bursting with questions but never daring to articulate a single one. Sometimes I would take the little one’s hand and squeeze it tight. Rather than affection or the sense of security he no doubt needed, I feel that this gesture served only to convey the unwanted lesson that there is no such thing, when all is said and done, as love without weeping, time without emptiness, or flesh without tearing, and that the defeated man he now saw before him is how things always turn out when you set your heart with sufficient fervor on something, whatever it may be. In his eyes, the figure of a protective father had no doubt vanished for good, his place taken by another creature, familiar and unknown in equal measure, as lost as he was and cornered by a sorrow that mirrored his own. The scene reminded me of a fairly well-known photograph by Manuel Ferrol that has for some reason been etched in my memory ever since I first saw it and somehow sums up the mood of those first weekends in the company of my children, one called Émigrés’ Farewell, taken in La Coruña in ’56. It’s not clear whether father and son are about to go their separate ways any minute or are saying goodbye to a third person just out of shot. A rough hand attempts to embrace the child with tenderness, although it does so with great awkwardness. The two of them are crying and looking straight ahead, perhaps at the gangway of a ship. Though in our case there were no ships, or sea, or anything in sight, everything that surrounded us was shot through with that air of a dockside farewell and the certainty that someone or something was stealing, from under our very noses, a huge shipment of things we would never see again. Perhaps my son, even as I embraced him, saw his father leaving.